Running Google Home on a Raspberry Pi
sounds really hard doesn’t it?

Following the instructions couldn’t be easier. It only took me about 20 minutes to get it up and running. If you want you can control devices like the Philips Hue with IFTTT and Google Assistant.

I have one of my Pi’s connected to a Philips Hue and Todo list.

Oh and I did enable party mode…

When setting up your Pi make sure that you are using a Pi 3. I tried for a whole day trying to get it to run on an original Pi while getting errors like “this is not compatible with this platform” before reading the requirements list and finding that you have to use a Pi 3.

All I can say is sometimes it helps to read the instructions.

In the next coming months we should be seeing support for the Google Home App. This will be especially useful for connecting to music services like Spotify
and Google Play Music.

I’ve found that when configuring the audio you need to type “alsamixer” (no speech marks) and turn both the audio output and audio input up to the max if you have a particularly quiet speaker and mic like me.

In Conclusion:

Everyone can have a Google Home “like” device for under £40 if you have the (minimal) skills required to set it up.

Alternatively if you don’t want to have Google Home then you can also install Amazon Alexa on the Pi instead but I am quite happy with the Google Option.

Have any problems? Drop me a comment below and I will see what I can do.